Contents

—GEORGE ROMNEY, speaking to the author about the fate of General Motors in the 1980s

Prologue

IN THE SPRING OF 1964, the young Chicago Cub outfielder, rejoining his team in Arizona, was determined that this season he would finally make his breakthrough. It was his third full year in the major leagues, and he was approaching a critical point in his career. His employers were no longer confident of his abilities—and with good reason, for he had played well below his potential so far. The men who ran baseball, he believed, gave you three years to prove yourself, and in his first two years he had ended up right on the margin: he had not fielded well and had proved to be only a .250-.260 singles hitter. To their eyes that made him at best a journeyman, in an age when baseball teams did not keep black journeymen around on their benches.

Still, Lou Brock, child of rural Southern sharecroppers, was confident that he had the talent to play in the big leagues. The Cubs, intrigued by his promise as a college player (and particularly by his great speed), had paid a handsome bonus to sign him, a great deal more than most young black players were getting at the time. But so far he had given only the slightest hint of the skills that they and the representatives of competing organizations had seen. One Chicago sportswriter, Bob Smith of the Daily News, had written brutally about his playing—not always unfairly, Lou Brock later thought. After one play in which Brock had been thrown out trying to take an extra base, Smith wrote that he had pulled a Rock, as in Brock. Then, in the 1963 season, Smith announced, If you have watched all the Cub home games thus far you probably had come to the conclusion that Lou Brock is the worst outfielder in baseball history. He really isn’t, but he hasn’t done much to prove it.

Brock was about to turn twenty-five. He was aware that the other young Cub players his own age were just hitting their strides and beginning to move ahead of him: his friend Billy Williams, a year older than Brock, had hit 25 home runs and knocked in 95 runs in the 1963 season; Ron Santo, a year younger than Brock, had hit 25 home runs as well, knocking in 99 runs. Perhaps, Brock thought, 1964 would be his turn. Some of his teammates thought him withdrawn, and they found it hard to gauge his emotional state. Some in the press and in the stands considered him too casual about his job, but that was a misperception. In fact, he was driven, not merely by a desire, but by a rage to succeed. He was determined to show the people who owned the Cubs, the sportswriters on the Chicago papers, and, most of all, his fellow players in the National League that he would not be merely a good major-league player but a great one. Those disappointed by his performance during those first two years would have been surprised to learn that in his need to leave behind the memories of a sharecropper’s life and seize on this rare chance to be a major-league ballplayer, he had wound himself so tight that he was unable to utilize his great natural abilities.

If some people in Chicago thought Brock not motivated enough, his Cub roommate, Ernie Banks, thought him too motivated, to the point that he had lost that most critical of athletic abilities: to relax and just play. In fact, Brock was so tense that he had trouble sleeping and eating. Banks, who recognized Brock’s fierce ambition, told his friend again and again to relax, that he was blocking his baseball abilities. Unlike most young ballplayers, Brock kept records of every game he played in—which pitchers he had faced, what pitches they had thrown him, and how well he had done against them. Banks had never seen a player so determined or goal-oriented. Before a road trip, Brock would write down how many hits he should get and how many runs he should drive in. He talked all the time about how he had to make it as a major-league star, about how it would mean a life of success and affluence; whereas failing would send him back to the extreme poverty from which he had come. I’ve got to make it here, Brock would say again and again. I just can’t go back to Louisiana and Arkansas. I’ve been there, and I know what’s there. I am here to play baseball, Banks would think, but Lou is here to fight a war. Banks worried that Brock was getting no pleasure from the game; he was sure that the more pleasure you got, the more naturally and the better you played.

Brock faced an additional early handicap. The Cubs played him in right field, which in Wrigley Field was the sun field, a truly murderous place for young outfielders. Because Brock’s minor-league career had been so brief—one season in Class C ball in Minnesota—he had never learned how to play a sun field. He had arrived in major-league baseball as a promising rookie, and yet no one had ever taught him how to flip down his sunglasses when a ball went into sun. As such, he not only kept losing balls in the sun, but worse, even when he did catch one, it appeared to be something of a life-and-death struggle. Playing on the road did not bother him, nor did playing on cloudy days in Chicago, but the mere thought of playing sunny day games at Wrigley would make him break into a sweat. If he misplayed a ball, the Cubs manager and coaches would have someone hit balls to him early the next morning, but somehow no one had yet figured out that the missing piece for him was how to handle the sun.

Brock had yet another worry as he arrived at spring training that season. The coaches saw him as a leadoff hitter, but, like most hitters, he believed himself a power hitter when he first reached the major leagues—for he had hit in the middle of the order in college and in the minor leagues. Suddenly he was supposed to hit at the top of the order, and the whole purpose of each at bat changed: he was to get on base, rather than to drive the ball. Some of the Cubs coaches were trying to mold him into becoming like Richie Ashburn, a classic leadoff hitter who knew how to hit to the opposite field and how to take a lot of pitches and draw walks from pitchers—on four occasions Ashburn had led the league in walks. But that was not Brock’s style. He did things that Ashburn could not do, he had more power and speed than Ashburn, and he did not want to be made into a black Ashburn. He hoped the coaches would not try to mess with him anymore, that they would just let him hit. He feared that the Cub management might send him back to the minor leagues for more seasoning. That thought terrified him.

OCTOBER 1964

1

THE YANKEES ARRIVED AT spring training as confident as ever. Their marquee names—Maris, Mantle, Ford—still inspired awe and fear among opponents. Most Yankee players as well as their fans remained confident about the coming season, which promised to mark the fifteenth year of a Yankee dynasty that had started with the arrival of Casey Stengel: since 1949 the team had won the pennant thirteen times and the World Series nine times. Yankee fans expected now that their team would always manage to win the pennant. In those years the Yankees were a spectacular, finely honed machine. They depended on a deep farm system so skillfully run that when critical parts of the team wore down, new and perhaps even better parts were always found. If by some chance the farm system failed to deliver, it was so rich in other parts that a three-for-one trade could be worked out with some hapless have-not franchise. This was the case with Roger Maris, the right fielder who, with his short, compact swing, appeared to have been born to play in Yankee Stadium, and who only three years earlier had not only beaten out Mickey Mantle for the annual home-run title but also broken Babe Ruth’s record for home runs in a single season as well. The Yankee players themselves had come to believe in their invincibility. They were not merely the best, they were the toughest players as well: they almost always won the big games, and because they had played in so many big games, they were therefore better prepared for the terrible pressures of a pennant race or a World Series. It was simply part of being a Yankee. All the best young players, it was presumed, wanted to play for this, the most celebrated sports franchise in America, not only because of the pride of playing with the best but also because of the lure of so many World Series bonus checks. In 1963, after Steve Hamilton joined the Yankees as a relief pitcher, Clete Boyer, the third baseman, showed him his World Series ring. As Hamilton admired it, Boyer said, Listen, Steve, the good thing about the Yankees is that you don’t just get a ring for yourself. You get yours the first year, then you get one the next year for your wife, and the year after that for your oldest kid, and after that for your other kids. Boyer himself already had four World Series rings. Just as Boyer predicted, Steve Hamilton got his first ring that year. The rings, along with the World Series checks, were built into the expectations of being a Yankee in those years. It was part of the lore of the team that Charlie Silvera, the Yankee backup catcher for much of that period, cashed seven World Series checks for some $50,000 (the actual total was $46,337.45)—a huge amount of money in that era, particularly for someone who had played in only one World Series game. Silvera would come to refer to the lovely house he bought in suburban San Francisco as the house that Yogi built, after the Yankee catcher whom he had played behind all those years.

Even in the matter of signing baseballs, the Yankees were set apart by their fame and success. Players on other teams might sign, at best, six boxes of a dozen balls a week, but the Yankees, because of their promotional commitments, had to sign ten or twelve boxes of a dozen balls a day. That was a daily chore few players liked, and there was a competition among the players to see who could sign the balls in the shortest amount of time. Whitey Ford was good at it, having shortened his autograph name to Ed Ford in order to expedite the process, saving four letters a ball, or forty-eight letters a box. As in all things, Tony Kubek was efficient and businesslike at signing, helped by the advantage of so short a name. Steve Hamilton thought Kubek could do twenty balls in a minute, which was something of a Yankee record. Hamilton himself was always slower, due to his long last name, but he could usually do fifteen in a minute. The most conscientious, in terms of ball signing, appeared to be Mickey Mantle, the team’s great star. Hamilton liked to come to the park early to get such routine chores as baseball signing out of the way. But no matter how early he came in, Mantle had somehow already signed the requisite number of balls. For a long time Hamilton was impressed by Mantle’s diligence, and then it struck him that in fact Mantle was never the first to arrive, that Hamilton was always there before Mantle. Since Mantle most assuredly did not do his signing at night after a long game, Hamilton even suspected that Pete Previte, the clubhouse boy, came in every morning and signed Mantle’s baseballs for him—although he could find no proof of this.

Still, by this time there was considerable evidence that the team was wearing down physically, and that the other American League teams were now being run by richer, smarter people who were less willing to have their best players culled by the Yankees. At the end of the coming season, for the first time, major-league baseball would move to a draft for new players signing their first contracts, a change specifically designed by other owners to limit the huge bonuses being paid to untried, green players—but also weakening the power of both the Yankees and the Dodgers. In addition, by 1964 the Yankee farm system was not the majestic organization that had existed at the beginning of the dynasty, for it had been severely cut back because of economic constraints. There was one great new talent pool, that of young black players, but it was well known that the Yankees had moved slowly in this direction. Sure of their success, sure of their past, and sure of their own racial attitudes, they had essentially sat on the sidelines in the fifties as a number of National League teams had signed the best of these young, supremely gifted and determined athletes. In fact, most astute baseball observers believed now that the entire American League was inferior to the National League because it had lagged behind in signing black players. The owners even began to suspect that this difference in the talent was showing up in the attendance figures, and that the American League was in trouble, in part because the Yankees had dominated it for a generation, and in part because the National League players were far more exciting to watch.

There were already tangible signs that the Yankees were in the early stages of their decline. They had beaten the Giants by the narrowest of margins in a great seven-game World Series in 1962, a series decided only on the last out. Then, in 1963, the Los Angeles Dodgers (powered primarily by two great pitchers) had swept the Yankees in four games. Though the Yankees appeared to have a number of talented young pitchers just beginning to come into their own, they had not yet come up with a single sure big-game winner to replace Whitey Ford, who was, by the spring of 1964, already thirty-five years old and increasingly dependent upon his shrewdness and courage. In his first thirteen World Series decisions Ford had been 9-4; in his last four he was 1-3. Some of the Yankee players were aware that time was catching up with their once virtually unbeatable team.

The previous October, the Yankees had lost their first two World Series games to the Dodgers in New York, and on the day off, as the Series shifted to Los Angeles, Ralph Terry, one of the best Yankee pitchers, had gone to the racetrack with Hal Reniff, a Yankee relief pitcher. Reniff was a true aficionado of the horse races, a man who loved to figure the odds at the track and other sporting events, and in honor of his talents his teammates had obligingly nicknamed him Clocker Dan. On this day, as he was going over the odds with Terry, Reniff asked Terry what he thought the odds were that the Dodgers would sweep the Yankees in four games. It was a long shot, answered Terry. A sweep of an ordinary team in a World Series was one thing, but a sweep of the Yankees was another. But Reniff continued to muse. It wasn’t really that long a shot, if you thought about it, Reniff said. In fact it was a real possibility. Look at the quality of the Dodger pitching, with Koufax and Drysdale both set to pitch in Los Angeles. As for the Yankees themselves, they seemed to be dominating on paper, but a lot of the top Yankee players were either hurt or coming off subpar seasons. Maris had been hurt and missed much of the season (he would come up only five times in the Series) and Mantle was clearly wearing down—he had come to bat only 172 times in the 1963 season and was not swinging well. The Yankees, Reniff said with the cool eye of a racetrack tout, were not really in very good shape. Terry listened carefully, hearing something he had not yet been willing to admit to himself. The odds on a sweep of the mighty Yankees had to be at least 50-1 and maybe 100-1, Reniff said. If Terry and Reniff were really smart and unscrupulous, they would each very quietly put down five hundred dollars on it. You know, Reniff finally said, the Dodgers could really sweep our asses. That, of course, was exactly what happened: Drysdale and Koufax, who were having astonishing years, with 557 strikeouts between them, both won in Los Angeles. Still, most of the Yankee players went home feeling that they had had the better team, but the edge had gone to the Dodgers because of their magnificent pitching.

In the spring of 1964 there were other signs that the team was wearing down. Jerry Coleman, the former Yankee second baseman, by then a broadcaster, was struck as he watched spring training that this was somehow not as tough and as disciplined a team as he had witnessed in the past. It was hard to tell about the talent level because some of the players were young, but Coleman was sure something was missing, perhaps some depth. Just after his retirement five years earlier, Coleman had worked in the farm system, and as the economics of baseball had changed, he had been charged with the melancholy task of getting rid of both a Double A and a Triple A farm team. That was a sign that the Yankee high command was cutting back in a major way, and it meant that the Yankees would employ half the number of players that they once did in the de facto staging area for the major-league club. There was a ripple effect in this: if there were fewer clubs at the top level in the farm system, there would soon be fewer signings as well. In the brief time that Coleman was working in the player personnel department, he had been sent out to Kearney, Nebraska, to check out how much talent the Yankees had on their rookie team there. Roy Hamey, briefly the team’s general manager, called Coleman in upon his return and asked what he had seen. We have one pitcher who might make Triple A, Coleman said. That irritated Hamey, who immediately sent Coleman’s superior, Bill Skiff, out to Kearney. Soon Skiff returned. Well, Bill, how much have we got out there? Hamey asked. Jerry’s right, he answered. Almost nothing. Now, some five years later, the Yankees still had young talent, but not as much as in the past.

As Coleman watched spring practice in 1964, he thought a different kind of player was beginning to come up. In the past, the Yankees had always signed the toughest kids, often for less money than they were offered elsewhere. For many of them, and Coleman had felt this way himself, being a Yankee was almost a religion. Now, Coleman thought, the younger players were not so singularly focused on baseball as those of his generation had been. Going out for dinner with his broadcasting partner, Red Barber, Coleman said, You know, Red, I don’t think the Yankees are going to win it this year. And Barber answered, I think you’re right.

The center of attention at the Yankee camp was the new manager, who was in fact the old catcher, Yogi Berra. The Yankee front office was in a state of flux. In 1960, general manager George Weiss, the efficient if not entirely lovable architect of much of the previous decade’s Yankee success, had been told by his employers that his services were no longer needed. Roy Hamey had come over from Milwaukee and briefly replaced Weiss (a fleeting moment when there was a good deal more interest in signing black players), but Hamey soon wanted out, and Ralph Houk was promoted to general manager after the 1963 season. Houk had managed the Yankees for the previous three seasons and had won the pennant all three times. Houk was known as a player’s manager, which meant that he could not have been more different in his approach than Casey Stengel, whom he had replaced. Not only did Stengel show little personal interest in his players, except insofar as what they might do for him on the field, he seemed loath even to learn their names. Born in 1890, Stengel came from an era in American life when very little emphasis was placed on being nice or kind to employees, and he was, in fact, rarely kind or nice to his players. He was often caustic, frequently making fun of them and putting them down to his beloved sportswriters. Stengel might be standing near the batting cage when a young player such as Jerry Lumpe was taking his swings and hitting the ball sharply to all fields. If a writer mentioned the lovely quality of Lumpe’s swing to Stengel, the old man would say, Yes, he looks like the greatest hitter in the world until you play him.

Stengel had his eye not merely on winning pennants, which he certainly wanted to do, but on history as well, and as far as his players were concerned, he seemed to be interested chiefly in courting writers. As far as Stengel was concerned, the writers were the critical link to history, and in return, they glorified his professional skills. The writers had always been important to him, and he always basked in their attention; many seemed as interested in him as they were in the game itself, and their interest was seductive. On one of the rare occasions that his Yankees did not win the pennant—in 1954 when Cleveland beat them—Stengel was stunned to find the New York writers abandoning him and his team to follow the Indians as they moved on to the World Series. Jesus, he told one reporter, I’m losing my writers.

Many of the writers remembered him from his leaner years of bad teams and second-division finishes, nine seasons of managing, and only one team that finished above .500; when he became the greatest manager in the game of baseball, the legitimate heir to the great John McGraw, it was all the sweeter. After all, he represented not just the present in baseball but the past as well, and the writers were interested in the past, as the players were not. Once when Mantle was young and the Yankees were going to play the Dodgers in the World Series, Stengel took Mantle out on the field in Ebbetts Field and tried to explain to him how he had played this particularly treacherous right-field wall. You mean you actually played here? asked the astonished Mantle. Later, Stengel gathered his writers around him, told the story, and shook his head. He thinks when I was born I was already sixty years old and had a wooden leg and came here to manage, Stengel said.

Later in his career with the Yankees, Stengel became even more drawn to the writers and, if anything, more protective of them. Aware that some of his players were less than hospitable to certain of the more irreverent journalists, Stengel often went out of his way to make sure that the shunned writers were taken care of. After more than a decade of Casey Stengel, the writers worshiped him, but the players had come to look upon him as a rather cold-blooded albeit wealthy grandfather who still controlled the family will and who turned on his very considerable charm only for outsiders. Ralph Houk changed that overnight. His loyalty was to the players. They were not just his players, they were his pals, or, in the vernacular he used, his pardners. He was an extremely political man, and he had a shrewd sense of the mood in the clubhouse and the resentments that had festered under Stengel despite all those years of winning. Houk was very much aware that Mantle had come to resent Stengel’s treatment of him and Stengel’s thinly veiled criticism (which tended to show up in the stories of various New York writers). Stengel always seemed to imply that no matter how much Mantle did and how well he played, he might somehow achieve even more and play at an even higher level, that he somehow never quite lived up to his potential, and, worse, that he was not a particularly smart baseball player. There was even a standing joke in the Yankee locker room among the players: Mickey, a player would ask Mantle, when are you going to live up to your potential?

The relationship between Mantle and Stengel had evolved over the years. Stengel had been a mediocre ballplayer himself, and for much of his career he had managed ballplayers even more mediocre than himself; when he finally got the Yankee job late in his career, he had been uneasy with Joe DiMaggio, who was at the end of his career, and who was an icon beyond the reach of a rookie manager. But Mantle had come to him as a boy, the greatest player Stengel had ever seen—all that power, all that speed; My God, said Stengel the first time he saw Mantle play, the boy runs faster than Cobb! Stengel had eagerly anticipated the chance to mold Mantle, to add to that magnificent body a mind filled with all the baseball knowledge and lore he had accumulated over four decades. Mantle, as the sportswriter Milton Gross wrote at the time, was to be the monument the old gent wanted to leave behind. Casey wanted his own name written in the record books as manager, but he also wanted a creation that was completely his own on the field every day, doing things that no other ballplayer ever did, rewriting all the records. But Mantle frustrated him; he remained pure Mantle, not a hybrid of Mantle/Stengel. It was then that Stengel tried to reach him by criticism, often meted out through the sportswriters. Again and again the player rejected Stengel’s advice. He would play hard, drive himself relentlessly in his own way and on his own terms, but he would not be Stengel’s creation.

There was already enough pressure on Mantle as it was—the, pressure of playing in New York, the pressure of replacing the great DiMaggio, and, above all, the pressure of living up to his father’s, Mutt Mantle’s, high expectations for him. He needed no additional pressure, no more lessons; what he needed was a means of escaping the pressure. It took everything he had to get through each day, and the last thing he wanted was a father figure as boss. If his and Stengel’s was to be a father-son relationship, it was, as the writer Robert Creamer noted, that of an angry father and a stubborn son. Over the years the relationship continued to deteriorate. Telling Mantle something is like telling him nothing, Stengel once told reporters, summing up his attitude toward his greatest player. To Stengel, Mantle was someone who had fallen short of his own true greatness, and to Mantle, his manager was more and more just a querulous old man who was never satisfied. It seemed even to the other players that Stengel saw not so much what Mantle did as what he did not do. To some degree Stengel’s attitude colored the attitude not only of the New York writers but of the New York fans as well. The glory that should so readily have been Mantle’s, the acclamation by the New York fans of his greatness and of his ability to carry the team year after year, came only after a decade of play and only when Roger Maris challenged him in the 1961 home-run derby. Then the fans somehow decided that it was Mantle’s prerogative to challenge Ruth, not Maris’s. Only then did they begin to cheer Mantle, as they jeered Maris. Hearing them boo Maris, Mantle noted with some degree of amusement, Roger has stolen my fans.

Ralph Houk knew that this was Mantle’s team, and the first thing he did as manager was to go to the center fielder and tell him what he knew: that Mantle was the leader of the team and therefore now the captain of it. That moment symbolized a significant change: Houk would cater almost exclusively to the players, often at the expense of the writers, whom he did not so much shun as treat as a necessary evil. In place of the brilliant press-conference soliloquies by Stengel, which some reporters thought worthy of Mark Twain, Houk gave the press a measure of bromides, reflecting both his eternal optimism and a shrewd awareness that his players would read his praise of them in the next day’s newspapers. With Houk the writers sensed a bunker mentality, a them-against-us attitude. If Stengel had his eye always fixed on history as recorded by the sportswriters, Houk was content merely to win pennants and world championships.

No one appreciated that more than Mantle. The Houk years were largely happy ones for the players, and frequently less happy for the writers. The younger players, who often played with considerable anxiety and insecurity, found Houk reassuring, a sort of surrogate father. He had been an average ballplayer himself, a backup catcher during the Berra years. During World War II he distinguished himself in the Battle of the Bulge, and ended the war as a major. Some of the older writers still called him Major (which irritated the younger, more iconoclastic writers to no small degree). He possessed an intuitive sense of how to get the most out of his players, whether they were stars or journeymen, and he was very good at walking the delicate line between being their pal and knowing exactly when to draw the line. He gave the players a perfect example of that in the 1963 season when the Yankees went into Boston for a two-admission day-night doubleheader. As the Yankees arrived, one of the Boston papers printed an interview with Mantle in which the star discussed how much he loved to play for Houk and how if Houk asked him to go through a brick wall, he would ask only where the wall was. On the day of the doubleheader, the two teams were barely able to finish the first game, for it began to rain heavily during the late innings. As they waited for the rain to stop and the second game to start, the players became restless and bored, anxious to get on with it one way or another—either to go back to the hotel or to play. In the dugout, Mantle was passing the time by telling country-boy stories, including one about carnal relations with farm animals. When Houk walked by, Mantle asked, Hey, Ralph, you ever done it with a sheep? The atmosphere suddenly became tense and the other players realized that Mantle had crossed a line; Houk, good guy, abiding friend and pardner of the players, was not to be asked ribald questions, not by anyone, not even a star. His authority as manager was suddenly at stake. Houk called Mantle over, and then, as if he were speaking privately to him, but at the same time in a voice that everyone could hear, he thanked Mantle for the generous things he had said about him in the Boston paper. Those are really kind words, Mickey, and I want to tell you they mean a lot to a manager.That’s okay Ralph, I meant every word, Mantle answered. Then Houk continued, Mickey, can you play in the second game if I need you? Mantle shrugged and asked Houk to look at the field, where the rain was still pouring down. Yeah, I know, Mickey, but with the field in that crappy condition I figure I may need you, because I’m thinking I don’t want to take a chance on getting any of my regulars hurt. It was a masterful response, thought the players: Houk had held on to his authority and defused the situation, had even turned it to his advantage by using Mantle as his straight man, and yet in no way had he wounded the ego of the team’s best and most beloved player.

Houk constantly told each player how good he was, how critical he was to the team’s success, no matter how small his role. Every player talked to Ralph Houk and managed to hear what he had wanted to hear. If he did not seem to be entirely on their side in their negotiations with management for larger salaries, then at least he did not seem to be against them in such negotiations either—that is, until Houk was made general manager in time for the 1964 season. Suddenly the nature of his job changed dramatically. In an organization famed for its reluctance to pay top salaries and in which World Series checks were traditionally counted by management as part of a player’s salary instead of as a bonus, Houk went overnight from player’s man to company man. Some of the players suspected that he did it too readily and too completely, and that, like his predecessor George Weiss, he received a bonus based on how much he held down the team payroll. The previous fall, after the Dodgers swept the Yankees in the World Series, Steve Hamilton, a young relief pitcher who had had a good year, asked Houk for a raise. He found a very different Houk than the one who had just managed the team and who had always told Hamilton how important he was to the team’s success. You know, Hammy, I’d love to give you a better contract, but I can’t. The Series, you know, only went four games and we didn’t make any money, Houk said. The former manager had gone overnight, Hamilton, who still admired Houk, said later, from blowing smoke to blowing acid rain.

Houk’s replacement as manager was a surprise to the team and to the media: Yogi Berra, the longtime star catcher. Berra was chosen, it was believed by those who knew the front office well, partly to compete with the upstart team in the New York area, the Mets, who were now managed by none other than the indefatigable Charles Dillon Stengel, soon to be seventy-four. Brilliant and verbal, live and in color, a nonstop one-man media show, Stengel could be safely called many things, but no one ever called him boring. The combination of the Mets’ virtually pristine incompetence and Stengel’s singular charm made the Mets a major draw, to the surprise of the Yankee ownership, which valued winning over fun. The more talented of the young New York sportswriters preferred covering the lowly Mets rather than the dynastic Yankees. The Yankees under George Weiss did not think in modern terms about the entertainment dollar, and the general manager had not wanted to broadcast the games on television, thinking that it was giving his product away for free. He had even been reluctant to sell the paraphernalia of modern baseball, including Yankee shirts, Yankee caps, and Yankee jackets. He did not want every kid in New York going around wearing a Yankee cap, he said, for it demeaned the Yankee uniform. The Mets were the reverse of this, and indeed part of their success in the earlier years happened because they successfully blurred the line between player and fan. The Mets were perceived as inept but lovable by a new generation of fans, while the Yankees were coming to be seen as the athletic equivalent of General Motors or U.S. Steel. Something profound was taking place in the larger culture and it was extremely troubling to the Yankee high command. In 1963 Yankee attendance slipped again, the second year in a row in which that had happened; it had surged to more than 1.7 million in 1961, the year Maris and Mantle had chased Ruth’s record, but fell by more than 200,000 a year in the two years after. In 1963 the Yankees drew only about 220,000 more fans than the Mets, and it seemed likely that in 1964, when the Mets moved into their handsome new home at Shea Stadium, they might well outdraw the Yankees (which, in fact, they did, with 1.7 million customers, or nearly half a million more than the first-place Yankees). My park, said Stengel, surveying Shea for the first time, is lovelier than my team.

In a somewhat misguided effort to become more popular, the Yankees decided to make Yogi Berra their manager. Over the years the New York media had viewed Berra as something of a cartoon figure: funny, awkward, but lovable, much given to inelegant but ultimately wise aphorisms. Some of the famous Yogiisms were genuine, but a good many were manufactured by the writers, and the real Yogi Berra was quite different from the one that had been invented by the press. He was shy and wary with strangers, particularly the media, because of their jokes about his looks (his wife, Carmen, smart and extremely capable, hated those jokes) and about his lack of education. In the beginning the jokes were more than a little cruel, but Yogi was shrewd enough to go along with them; had he resisted, the jokes would have taken on a longer life. But it still did not mean he liked them. Nor was he the easiest of interviews. Why do I have to talk to all these guys who make six thousand dollars a year when I make forty thousand dollars a year? he once asked in what was to become a rallying cry for thousands of ballplayers yet unborn.

The truth was that the Yankees had made a serious miscalculation if they hired Berra because he was good with the media. Rather, the media was good with him—inventing a cuddly, wise, witty figure who did not, in fact, exist. It was no surprise that as the Yankee players arrived for their first workout that spring, there was a cartoon on the New York Daily News sports page entitled, A Few Words Before the Season, which showed a grinning Berra in baseball uniform with a tiny cartoonist armed with pen and sketchbook standing on his arm and saying, A cartoonist’s dream! With that mug of yours I hope y’ stick aroun’ forever. As a player, Yogi had been surprisingly quick and nimble in a body that did not look particularly athletic, and he was a very dangerous late-inning hitter. A rather strange fellow of very remarkable abilities, Stengel once said of him. His new assignment was going to be difficult: he was replacing a popular manager who was still close to the players and who was now his boss. Moreover, he was going to be managing his former teammates, who respected him as a player but who had frequently joked about him, and who thought him, among other things, uncommonly close with a dollar. Yogi was not a man who by his very presence inspired the respect of his teammates, as Mantle, Ford, and even Elston Howard, the catcher, did (though it was too early for anyone in baseball to think of a black man like Howard as a manager). When his friend and teammate Mickey Mantle was asked how the team would do now that Berra had replaced Houk, Mantle answered, I think we can win in spite of it.

Berra was aware of the reservations of his teammates, and he was determined to get off to a good start with them. Before his first team meeting he stopped by to see Bobby Richardson, the veteran second baseman, in order to give a dry run of his first speech to the team as its new manager. Okay, he was going to say, this is a new season. We’ll put 1963 behind us. We’re going to have new rules: no swimming, no tennis, no golf, no fishing. Then he would pause and say, I’m kidding. We’ll play hard, we’ll play together, we’ll be relaxed, and we’ll win. Richardson thought it a fine way to start the season, particularly for a manager addressing former teammates. But during the actual speech, when he got to the list of fake new rules, Mantle said very loudly, I quit! and the speech had been ruined. It was not a good start.

2

THAT SPRING BING DEVINE knew his job was on the line. He had been general manager of the Cardinals since 1957, but he had not yet produced a pennant winner, and Cardinals owner Gussie Busch was hardly the most patient of men. Busch was the Budweiser tycoon, accustomed to having his every whim fulfilled. Since he was immensely successful in the beer business, he assumed that he would be equally successful in the world of baseball, about which he knew almost nothing. Busch was an extroverted, zestful man, a booze-and-broads kind of guy in the words of Harry Caray, the team’s announcer, who by his own word was also a booze-and-broads guy and a close pal of Busch’s until he got too close. Busch was a generous man, albeit generous on his own terms. He had to win at everything, most notably at card games. He did not like to be alone, and he tended to be followed by an entourage of cronies. Being truly claustrophobic, he did not like to fly on airplanes, so he traveled either in a massive custom-built and custom-outfitted bus or in his own luxuriously outfitted railroad car. On either of these vehicles there were likely to be a lot of drinking, cards, and attractive young women.

It was the rare Busch crony who did not believe in his heart that he was a baseball expert. Therefore, being a baseball manager or a general manager for Gussie Busch was a high-risk occupation. To make matters worse, the tycoon thought himself a man of the people and was prepared to listen to this endless parade of self-styled baseball experts he ran into every day. He was also readily accessible to local reporters, often, it turned out, after he already had a head start drinking either his own product or that of other alcohol manufacturers. If the team went on a losing streak, as it often did, and if a reporter reached Busch at home to ask if he was happy with the way the team was going, he was likely to say no, he goddamn well was not happy. That had happened when Eddie Stanky was managing and the team was on an eight-game losing streak. When the words were in print the next day, it was clear that time was running out for Stanky. Every day of August Busch’s life, Bing Devine thought ruefully years later, there had to be any number of people telling him, Hey, Gussie, you made a winner out of Bud, how come you can’t make a winner out of the Cards?

At the tail end of the 1963 season, the Cardinals had launched a furious if belated drive for the pennant, winning nineteen of twenty games, and that had whetted everyone’s appetite for what was going to happen in 1964. Whether the 1964 team was as good as it had been in that miraculous, almost flawless three-week stretch was by no means a certainty. Devine had spent his entire life in the Cardinal organization, apprenticing from the bottom up, and there was no job so insignificant that he had not performed it. Back in the thirties, when Branch Rickey ran the organization, there were some thirty teams in the farm system, and Bing Devine made sixty-five dollars a month for the most menial of tasks. He began every day by collecting the telegrams from all the general managers of the different Cardinal farm clubs reporting what their team had done the previous day. Then Devine went to the various blackboards that listed each league and each Cardinal team, erased the old standings, and wrote in the new ones. He was therefore an expert on how a seemingly unbeatable team could unravel almost overnight based on an injury or two, he knew how two star players could